Metamodernism: Navigating Discourse and Identity in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life

Abstract

This paper investigates the articulation of metamodernism at the beginning of the 21^st century and how this new paradigmatic apparatus of interpretation of the world can be applied to Kate Atkinson’s novel, Life After Life (2013). Metamodernism was firstly formulated by Dutch theorists Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen and comes as a response to postmodernism. Metamodernism explores the topics of informed naivety, affect in fiction, authenticity, transcendence and the function of historical hybridity, while acknowledging and using the postmodernist pastiche and parody, combined with the modernist ambiguity, openness to innovation and importance of grand narratives. This paper examines the applicability of metamodernism to Kate Atkinson’s novel, Life After Life, a historical fiction novel about the multiple lives and deaths of Ursula Todd as she navigates through various historical events in 20th-century Europe, exploring the themes of fate, resilience, and the impact of individual choices on the course of one's life. By incorporating the metamodernist “manifesto”, a theoretical and critical corpus and by using a close-reading method on the novel, this paper demonstrates that metamodernism is a paradigm that tries to adapt to the contemporary state of constant crisis and its applicability to Atkinson’s fiction. This analysis showcases the degree to which metamodernism contributes to understanding the complexity of the 21^st century and whether it fits the aesthetic of the novel.